Originally Posted by
Chris Scott
It would be useful, however, for the purpose of our present discussions, not least to improve our understanding of the data. I would like to see the T/O and climb, if only to observe the acceleration of the engines from idle to T/O thrust...
Agreed, if only for the sake of completeness. However, the BEA's response to Capt. Asseline's correct assertion that the elevators briefly deflected down while he had the stick back was a thorough real-world reconstruction of the aircraft's commanded flightpath - an experiment entailing significant effort and expense*. Is it not therefore reasonable to infer that the BEA compared engine performance data at take-off and during the accident sequence against both each other and an optimum set of test data - and found no significant anomalies?
One thing that has always puzzled me about Capt. Asseline's responses in the aftermath of the accident is that the BEA's report, far from assigning the causes purely to the actions of the flight crew, actually implicitly hauls AF's operations practices over the coals - not just in terms of highlighting the woefully inadequate briefing materials, but also highlighting contradictory rules and regulations pertaining to conduct of display flights. Reading between the lines the report more-or-less implies a reasonable argument that the crew were almost set up to fail. Capt. Asseline and his lawyers could likely have turned this into the most clear-cut example of mitigating circumstances in history, and yet they ignored that angle in favour of going after Airbus. To me this makes so little sense that I can't begin to fathom out why.
EDIT :
* - To put the question from another angle, if the BEA were being pressured to go easy on AI, why go to all that trouble and expense when a verbal response with no experiment would have carried the same weight in an official sense?